While compressed textures are widely used in the industry, there are no universal agreed on formats that are available on all platforms. Application software that must work on multiple platforms have to either support multiple compressed texture formats resulting in increased application complexity, or choose to use uncompressed texture formats which is the one option that is universally available on all platforms. Additionally, there are some texture images, such as fonts, that don't compress well using some of the accepted types of compression, resulting in jagged edges.
Storage devices (e.g., dynamic random access memory devices) have become sufficiently inexpensive that the larger amount of storage space taken by uncompressed texture images versus compressed texture images is generally not seen as a cause for concern. However, retrieving uncompressed texture images from storage for use in applying textures to rendered objects can require significantly more storage accesses than retrieving compressed texture images. Such increases in the number of accesses arising from the use of uncompressed texture images can become significant where the application of textures is done for each frame of a series of frames of computer-generated animation.
Increases in the number of storage accesses entails greater use of buses and buffer components, all of which consumes electric power at a greater rate. This greater rate of consumption can become significant in portable computing devices relying on electric power sources of limited capacity, such as a battery.